Congress honors Texan for raising KBR rape claim

Other former contractors in Iraq tell similar stories at Senate hearing

WASHINGTON — On a day when dramatic testimony highlighted new rape allegations involving KBR employees in Iraq, the Houston-area woman whose lawsuit first brought the issue to public attention was honored in Washington by members of Congress.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, commended former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones on Wednesday for going public about an alleged gang rape by colleagues shortly after she arrived in Baghdad to work for the Pentagon's largest military contractor. At a ceremony on Capitol Hill, Jones, 23, received the Suzanne McDaniel Public Awareness Award, named after one of the first prosecutor-based victim advocates in Texas.

Poe, the co-chairman of Congress' Victim's Rights Caucus, helped bring Jones back to the United States after the alleged attack in 2005, following a telephone alert from her father.

Poe said members of Congress were honoring Jones for raising national awareness about the plight of American contractor employees who are victimized while serving overseas.

Jones, formerly of Conroe, told a House panel in December that she had been attacked after accepting a drink from a group of firefighters who also worked for the Houston-based contracting firm at Camp Hope in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Jones has since created the Jamie Leigh Jones Foundation, a nonprofit organization designed to help victims of rape and sexual assault who were attacked while working for U.S. contractors overseas.

Hours before the awards ceremony on Capitol Hill, a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee heard testimony from other women who repeated stories of sexual assaults similar to Jones'.

Dawn Leamon, of Lena, Ill., told the Senate panel that a soldier and a co-worker sodomized her and forced her to have oral sex during her assignment as a paramedic for Service Employees International Inc., a foreign subsidiary. The alleged attack at Camp Harper near Basra occurred two months after Jones had described her attack before the House panel.

A third alleged victim, Mary Beth Kineston, of Ohio, told the Senate panel that she had been sexually assaulted while working as a truck driver for KBR in Iraq in 2004.

Jones told the Associated Press that she was upset by the additional reports of sexual assaults. "It bothers me that it happened again after I stood up (in December) and brought awareness to it and brought KBR to such scrutiny," she said.

Jones is awaiting a judicial ruling on whether she can obtain a trial in her suit against Halliburton, KBR's former parent company.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate subcommittee that heard the testimony, said U.S. women working in Iraq and Afghanistan "continue to be assaulted while their assailants continue to go free." He added: "We've got a problem that justice is breaking down here."

Poe urged Nelson's subcommittee to close legal loopholes that he said make it harder to prosecute crimes committed overseas by American civilian contractors.

"The United States government has a responsibility to protect American civilians who work in support of an American military mission overseas," Poe wrote. "Americans cannot go abroad and commit attacks on fellow Americans without the long arm of the law holding them accountable."

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said the company had no comment on Poe giving Jones the McDaniel Award.